One of the blessings of retired life is being able to spend time with our grandchildren. Living close to the ones in Washington gives us plenty of opportunities to observe them and be immersed in their daily lives. And our current trip to South Carolina gives us an opportunity to spend a couple of weeks immersed in the life of our grandson who lives here.

When our children were younger, I was aware that there were significant differences between the way they grew up and the way I grew up. Times change, opportunities change, attitudes change. I didn’t participate in any organized team sports until I was in the fifth grade, when I played basketball for a short season. I played little league baseball for one season, but didn’t do it a second season. I did start playing in the band when I was in the fifth grade and continued to play in the band throughout the rest of my formal education. I still play the trumpet on occasion but am not currently part of an organized ensemble.

Most of the time we occupied ourselves with free play when we weren’t in school. During summer vacation, we built tree forts, played in the river, floated in inner tubes, caught grasshoppers and went fishing - all with minimal adult supervision. My parents weren’t inattentive, though my father worked long hours, most of the time balancing two jobs. And with seven children in the family, our mother was busy. She kept books for our father’s business, cooked meals for the gang, sewed much of our clothing, and there were boys younger than me that needed more care and supervision.

I don’t think we suffered from a lack of supervision. We lived in a small town. We knew that if we got into trouble the story would get back to our parents before we did. But there were lots of hours in our lives when we weren’t the focus of our parents’s attention. I often went to work with my father, and the focus was definitely not on me. I learned to entertain myself when he was talking with customers. I listened in on a lot of adult conversation. I tried to help and learned a few adult skills as he worked.

A generation later, our children were raised with a much higher level of consciousness about safety. We had car seats and bike helmets, items that were not present in my life as a child. We didn’t let our children play unattended very much. If they were outside playing and we were inside, their area was limited to our back yard and the door was open. When they played with friends, we made sure that we knew the friends’ parents and that we were aware of their presence and supervision.

Our children didn’t get too involved in team sports, but they had more structure to their time. We took them to library story hours and explored the children’s museum and science exhibits. We took them to parks and they played in playgrounds. Like our parents, we were busy, and there were times when our children had to be patient with adult activities, but we worked in a church which had a nursery dedicated to childcare and spaces specifically designed for children of all ages. We shifted our schedule around so that one of us was home when they got out of school and summer vacations were filled with a variety of planned activities.

Our grandchildren also have busy parents, and the parents work hard to make the most of their time with the children. They also invest a lot of energy in planning supervised activities for their children.

Here in South Carolina, our 5-year-old grandson goes to a full day Kindergarten program. We and our children attended half day programs, but those don’t seem to exist any more. He is on a soccer team that has practices or games twice a week. He has joined a garden club at his school that meets weekly. When he is not in school there are all kinds of activities. Of course our visit has meant that things are not quite in the normal. In his regular routine he probably doesn’t go to the Ed-venture children’s museum on Saturday and the Zoo on Sunday, but that is what we did this week.

I don’t think he has very much time in his life when his activities aren’t supervised. Now that he is in kindergarten his mother is interviewing for jobs and she’ll soon be going back to work. When that happens, he will participate in before school and after school programs at his school. His parents, aware of how much time they are spending at work will plan to make the most of their time with him.

Anthropologist Barry Hewlett studies child-rearing in hunter-gatherer societies in Central Africa. He writes that children in those societies spend lots of time with their parents. They are with their parents as they go about their routines and they often help with adult tasks. It is rare, however, when they are the object of their parents’ attention. The children are sometimes bored and sometimes engaged and spend much of their time observing adults doing adult things.

This is a stark contrast where when they are with their parents, our grandchildren are the center of their parents’ attention. They are driven to their activities, they are observed and monitored by adults in safe spaces.

It is an overstatement, but it is as if our children value quality over quantity when it comes to spending time with their children. Children in hunter-gatherer societies get lots of quantity of time, but the quality may not be up to the standards of contemporary American parents.

In a way, being a parent is a much harder job for contemporary parents in our country. They have to invest a lot of effort. Planning is part of their parenting style. The way I grew up, there wasn’t much planning about how we would spend our time. Our parents didn’t manage our schedules other than to expect us to be at school and at church on time and to be at the dinner table when called.

I am in no position to say that one style is superior to the other, and I know that these are generalizations. But as I observe our grandchildren, I am aware of how things change and I wonder what kind of parents our grandchildren will be when their time comes.